Jewish Eyes

 Behind Muslim Veils:
 Our Daughters and Sisters Imprisoned by Arab Men
By Braha Bender


This leaves me shaken. It keeps me up at night. Two nights I have not been able to fall asleep, visions of what I just heard dancing in my head. She is out there, alone and helpless. She is our sister. She is a Jew. And she is suffering. Most of us are not aware of this tragedy. But she is desperate for our help, desperate to get back her life. The life her Arab husband has stolen from her.
One Less Jew
 It doesn’t begin with abuse. Arab-Israeli men begin pursuing Israeli women by befriending them. Often the men are driven by their dreams of taking over the Jewish State. The obliteration of the Jewish people is their goal, and capturing one Jewish girl means one less Jew to worry about when the revolution comes. One less Jew in the world.
First the Arab tricks the girl into trusting him by giving her gifts, chocolates and money. Then he convinces her to marry him and move with him to his native Arab village. Then he locks her in the house, and the beatings begin. The Jewish women stolen away in this manner are madeto serve as slaves for the entire Arab family.
 Rebbetzin Rachel Baraness of The Jerusalem House took it upon herself to care about and help these Jewish daughters. Eighteen years ago Rebbetzin Baraness met a Jewish girl with black and blue bruises all over her neck. She asked where the marks came from and learned about the nightmare of Jewish women married to Arabs who live in their villages where their lives become worse than being in a prison camp. She learned that trying to escape these tyrants puts them at risk of death, and that risk becomes much greater if they try to leave with their children.
She learned that these women had often lost touch with their families; many had lost the contact with their families, or their families were clueless as to how to cope with the magnitude of their trauma.
She learned that these young women needed a home to escape to.
First one, then the next, then the next came to live in the widowed Rebbetzin Baraness’s home. Soon the need for a larger facility demanded further financial support. The aid of the Charity of Light Fund was enlisted. The Jerusalem House, a shelter facility for Jewish girls and women escaping Arab men, was born.
No Immunity

Who is the girl who is crying from pain? Whose face do you see? Do you see your neighbor’s daughter’s face? Do you see the face of the Bais Yaakov girl in the supermarket? Of course not. You assume that this can’t happen in our circles.
But what about the frum girl who naively responded to the young Arab boy who delivered the family groceries from the supermarket every week? She didn’t mean anything... she was just being polite... but he ensnared her.
What about the seminary student who walked by a construction site and attracted the attention of the Arab construction workers there?
Consider a typical supermarket. Aren’t the majority of the workers Israeli girls working alongside Arabs? Daily favors, compliments, and gifts have swallowed up the common sense of some good girls.
Many Arabs are actively pursuing Israeli girls right now as you read this article. Since the founding of the State of Israel, more than 3,000 Israeli girls have lo aleinu succumbed and “converted” to Islam and married Arab men via the Muslim courts. Not all of them are from impoverished or dysfunctional homes.
A recent Jerusalem House resident had met the Arab she married at her job.
Rebbetzin Baraness and other Jerusalem House staff hold lectures for the sake of educating the public about the dangers young Arabs represent to their girls. Parents must warn their daughters.
Rescue Operations

“In all my years in the field I have never seen a Jewish girl [in] a relationship with an Arab where he did not ... [abuse] her,” says Reb Levi Chazen. “Rescuing a Jewish girl from an Arab village means risking your life” to save a life.
Reb Levi Chazen is financial manager and staff member of the Jerusalem House. One girl was the daughter of a Jewish woman married to an Arab man. When the daughter began asking too many questions about her Jewish heritage, the men of the family locked her in an attic. Beatings and starvation were just the beginning. When her mother found out that the girls’ brothers were planning to murder her within a few days, she managed to smuggle the information to her daughter in the attic. That night, realizing she had nothing to lose, the young Jewish girl jumped out of the attic window and fell three stories to the concrete below. She lost all her teeth and broke her jaw, but, with the kindness of Hashem, her arms and legs were functional enough for her to escape from the Arab village. The now homeless girl was living on a park bench when someone began to speak with her, found out her story, and sent her to The Jerusalem House.
She had no money, no water to shower, no clothes but the filthy rags on her back. She knew no one. She was hungry. Her jaw was broken and she had no teeth. Jerusalem House took this girl in, cared for her, fed her, provided a clean place to live and medical care. If it hadn’t been for the Jerusalem House, where would this girl be today?
“I Made a Mistake”
Saving a Jew from an Israeli Arab village is life-threatening, and the new military borders between Palestinian territories and Israel make rescue missions that much harder. However, the drive to survive can overcome even military barriers.
Israeli soldiers at a military base bordering a Palestinian governed Arab village recognized a certain middle-aged Arab woman, wearing the traditional chador, head covered by a scarf wrapped tightly around her face and neck. Every day, at the same exact time, this woman would walk outside the village lugging a big bag of trash, and toss it in a garbage dump outside the village boundaries.
Every day she would inch closer and closer to the military base, until one day she threw a rock at the soldiers. Before returning her aggression, the Jewish soldiers noticed a note wrapped around the rock. “I made a mistake,” it said. “I am a Jew but I married an Arab. Save me.” The note explained that she was rarely allowed outside the house. Could they please help her? They devised a plan to rescue her, and the soldiers brought her to The Jerusalem House. Her gratitude and relief knew no bounds.
Unhappy Ending
The Jerusalem House’s success rate is approximately 85%. Unfortunately, there are some unhappy endings. One Jewish woman who turned to The Jerusalem House for help explained that she had been married to an Arab man for decades. They had met in Israel and she had soon “converted” to Islam and moved to live with him in Shechem. However, as her Arab husband was about to be exiled from the country due to his terrorist activities, the couple moved to Jordan and left two teenage daughters behind, in Israel. The Jewish woman got back to Israel with her son on the pretense that she was coming to visit her daughters. Once inside the country, she turned to the Jerusalem House for shelter. The shelter is only for women without children. For the women who do manage to escape with their children, the Jerusalem House provides safe houses around the country where, shrouded in anonymity, their furious Arab husbands cannot find them. An apartment like this was provided to the woman and her son who had escaped from their terrorist husband and father in Jordan. They were well on their way to a new life. But one day Jerusalem House staff members found the apartment empty. “They didn’t even leave a note,” says Reb Levi Chazen dryly. Why did they leave? Had their suffering affected them so thoroughly that they believed they were not worth saving?
Rehabilitation
The rehabilitation process at the Jerusalem House involves counseling, psychiatric treatment if needed, and provision for the girl’s physical needs including clothing, food, toiletries, and everything else. “These girls arrive with nothing,” Rebbetzin Baraness explains. “They have no clothing, no money. They’ve been beaten. They’re broken people. They’re entirely helpless.” But caring and love can change a great deal. Sometimes in the middle of the night, someone just needs to talk. She’s feeling depressed or frightened. Perhaps she is remembering her terrible life as an abused wife and wonders if she can ever be normal. Rebbetzin Baraness is a straight-talking, unpretentious woman. She quietly describes the love and warmth she lavishes on the girls every day. It’s simple, really. Love heals. Treatment and understanding and safety heal. Group support heals.
Rebbetzin Baraness also provides the girls with the skills to eventually lead an independent life of their own. “I don’t let them sink,” she says. The Jerusalem House provides some courses in basic skills the girls may lack. The girls are given many Torah shiurim. They have not lived a Torah life or kept mitzvos in a long time, if ever, and need to learn. “The girls respect me when they see me keeping Shabbos, so they keep it as well,” Rebbetzin Baraness explains.“And the new girls who come to the shelter have the older girls as role models as well.”
Rebbetzin Baraness has married off about 700 of “her girls” to bnei Torah over the past 18 years and isn’t planning on stopping any time soon.
New Beginnings
As we speak about the important rescue-and-rehabilitate work being done,
Rebbetzin Baraness and Reb Levi Chazen tell me that a Jerusalem House wedding is scheduled to take place that night. “This girl came to us after being in and out of mental hospitals ten times. She had met an Arab in Eilat,” Rebbetzin
Baraness says. “He ‘converted’ her to Islam, married her and took her to live with his family. They enslaved her and beat her. She did not know how to escape.”
Managing to escape from the Arab village after many months, the girl admitted herself to a mental hospital, hoping that the facility could protect her from the fury of her Arab captors who sought to kidnap her and take her back to keep working for them. “The husbands always come looking. We keep them [hidden] until the search has ended. It takes months,“ says Reb Chazen. But the girl was not mentally ill (though she was traumatized), so the mental hospital soon discharged the girl into the custody of a sister who did not know how to cope with the traumatized young woman. The sister sent the girl back to the mental hospital. The cycle repeated itself until the sister turned to Rebbetzin Baraness, begging her to take care of her sister.
That was a year and a half ago. The Jerusalem House team of professionals and the love of Rebbetzin Baraness took effect quickly. “Tonight she will be marrying a ben Torah,” I was told. Thanks to the Jerusalem House, another life is saved.
Thank G-d the Jerusalem House was there for her — and so many others.


Mitzvas Pidyon Shevuim
The Jerusalem House is the only shelter for Jewish women battered by Arabs in the world today. Yad L’Achim works in conjunction with the Jerusalem House as Yad L’Achim does not have any shelter facilities. Once they have rescued an Israeli girl from an Arab village, they send her to the Jerusalem House. But the Jerusalem House can only afford to shelter 25 young women at a time. “It really is just a matter of money. If we could double our shelter space today, there would be 60, 70 girls knocking on our door by tonight,” Reb Levi Chazen says. Harav Ovadiah Yoseph and many other Gedolim strongly endorse the Jerusalem House. Perhaps if the need were known, it would be filled.
To save a Jewish girl’s life and the lives of her children, please call  Levi Chazen at 972-52-300-3293 or e-mail levi@thestoryofhope.org

 
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